Recommended Posts

Since I started this thread, then it falls on me to do the after-action report. For ease of comparison, I have joined both of our finished pictures together:

Very different results! This illustrates my favourite part about miniature painting and why I think painting your own is better than prepaints. Prepaints might be quicker (obviously), but every painted miniature is a unique one-of-a-kind original. There may be many Thanis figures, but only one of each of these in the entire world.

Guindyloo did a smashing job on hers and it looks gorgeous! There's so much going on that mine looks a bit plain by comparison, but it makes for a very good illustration of the difference taking your time can make on a piece. Both pieces were done using essentially the same basic methods with layering thinned paint to make shades and highlights, so the major difference mostly comes down to time and effort.

So a lingering question might be: if taking your time looks so much better, why wouldn't you just do that? I actually agree - if you have the time to spend then you absolutely should, it will pay off and you'll have a much better result. But this best case isn't necessarily applicable to every person in the hobby, and some people - for a variety of reasons - either cannot or do not want to spend swaths of time on each figure. This may apply to people who need figures for use in games, people who want to hobby but their daily life limits their time, or people who have an enormous hoard of figures they want to paint before they die.

I'm in that latter category. I have a genuinely ridiculous amount of miniatures, I'm not even sure how many. I got real busy buying things this year, so I'd say a fair estimate might be 700-900 metal figures alone. Add in Bones to that and it's 1300-1500. And this collection may be small compared to some! If we estimate an average time of 1 week, painting every day, for each figure then that's 1500 weeks (or slightly under 30 years). That's a long time to wait to play D&D!

So my goal has been to paint as good as I can as fast as I can. I don't think fast means it has to look crummy, but it does require using shortcuts and making compromises. For the bulk of my figures this is fine, but I have a smallish number of Special Figures or various sorts, and on those I would prefer to spend more time so I can do a quality job (Reaper's 25th Anniversary figures fall into this category).

Speed is not on a per-figure basis, as Thanis took me 3 days. My Princess of Hell gobbled up six whole days, because she's greedy. Takhisis took 12. This will happen, so you can make up time if you have to do low-level bulk monsters (kobolds, orcs, goblins). Your speed will come from an average rate of production.

As an example, in the time it took Guindyloo to do her very nice Thanis, I did these less-fancy but servicable minis:

Which breaks down to three days for Thanis, two for Lanah the Barbarian, 1 for Marbrezuk, and 1 for the 3 Skeletons. 5 for the week, not terrible. I got a bunch of orcs from the melt table at Reapercon, so doing some of them this week might get me 10 or more and make up for the 5-figure week.

And that's how you get your speed while still being decent. But remember that how you paint is up to you, and there's nothing that locks you in one way or the other. You can switch back and forth at any time, and much of the practical experience can carry over from one to the other. The only real secret to painting minis isn't a secret at all: Paint Em!

Remember this simple bit of wisdom: Any mini good enough to buy is one good enough to paint, and any mini worth painting you're good enough to paint. You are. Even if you don't believe, I believe it. You can paint that Object Source Lighting (OSL). You can paint that Non-Metallic Metal (NMM). You can paint those tiny eyes and fiddly details. But only if you try, you can't learn it any other way. You don't have to paint this stuff, but if you want to then remember that you definitely can. So do it! You might mess it up the first few times, but it'll come together. You are already good enough, you only have to show yourself.

As a final word, my special thanks to Guindyloo for her wonderful contirbution to this thread. My special thanks to you for reading all the way through it! My special thanks to Reaper and the artists who have given us 25 years of excellent miniatures to play with. And most of all, my very special thanks to you, the beginner, who just joined our hobby. You are what keeps it all going year after year. Welcome, friend! Pull up a chair and grab a brush!

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Finally found this thread and just finished through it. It's an absolutely phenomenal piece and incredibly helpful to everyone who wants to tackle this. I would ask, nay, implore you to make even more of these.........and tell me when you start it, so I don't have to run to catch up.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I don't think that Buglips' version of Thanis looks plain at all - I really like his version. I think it's important to note that it's not just our methods that are different - our painting style is very different as well. I think it's most obvious when looking at his group shot of everything that he's painted in the last week - he trends toward using more muted and organic colours in his painting that results in a somewhat darker, more realistic look to his figures. I, on the other hand, prefer to paint with lots of bright colour and high contrast that results in more of a fantasy look. I'd be interested to know if that's most affected by our approaches, our influences, our different tastes or something else entirely.

I want to reiterate one of the points that Buglips and I promote a lot and that is letting go of fear in your painting. It's so easy to let fear cripple you when you're painting because there's a lot that we let take hold of us in this hobby. Fear that you're not good enough, that you're going to mess up a figure or waste paint or waste time or that if your latest figure isn't as good as your previous one that people will think less of you or you don't know how to do a technique so you just avoid doing it or a figure looks too complicated so you shove it in a drawer and relegate it to "Some Day™." It's also far too easy to look at painters that have far more experience than you do and think "I'm never going to be that good" and then you let that fear take hold of you and you don't even try and if you don't try, then you really won't ever be.

I have struggled with so many of those fears and self-doubt and frustration with myself. I wanted to relay some of that struggle in my posts because fear is not something that you can just make go away, it's something that you have to face and work through or you'll just always be afraid of it. I don't want to always be afraid of NMM and OSL and normal skintones or get stuck frustrating myself thinking that I have to paint everything as perfectly as I possibly can. Sometimes things aren't going to work out the way you wanted or you're not going to know how to fix something that's gone wrong or you're going to have a bad painting day in general. It's ok. It really is. You just have to push through it, face your fears, and accept and learn from your mistakes. Mistakes are valuable because they allow you to sit back and say "Ok, what did I do wrong and how can I fix it?" Sometimes you can re-approach it and fix it on the spot. Sometimes the better choice is to say "Alright, that went awry, but now I know that I should approach it differently the next time."

Another thing that I have struggled with for a long time is how long it takes me to paint figures. (We won't get into how many of them I have lurking in every corner of my apartment or the likelihood that I'll ever get paint on all of them before I die. ) I had really accepted for a long time that I was just always going to be a slow painter and it just was what it was. But guess what I discovered - it's not true. I might not ever be a speed painter, but 6 months ago, Thanis would've taken me an entire month to paint. And you know what made me get faster? It was letting go of a lot of the fear that was holding me back. I was languishing over every decision - every colour choice, every highlight, every blend, every single brush stroke. And I was lying to myself about it - I kept telling myself that I was just being careful or I was working on my brush control or that was just the way I painted and it was fine. It wasn't, it was nonsense; I was absolutely terrified. I was just as terrified 6 months ago as I was when I first started painting. The fear had just changed from "Omg these things are tiny" to "I'm never going to be good enough." That's a terrible way to approach something, especially something that you're genuinely passionate about. I was making myself miserable, had no desire to paint and wasn't getting anywhere.

But since I started working on facing and letting go of my fears? Well, just to throw out a little teaser since there's interest, Buglips and I first talked about starting to work on something next weekend. Now we're talking about starting to work on that something in the next couple of days.

So, I echo Buglips' thanks and will add my thanks to him for helping me to face my fears. I literally wouldn't have even started this hobby had it not been for Buglips' older posts of encouragement that anyone can paint these tiny things and I wouldn't be where I am now with it if it weren't for him pushing and encouraging me along the way.

I'm so glad that y'all have found this helpful, thanks for following along with my lengthy posts and bad pictures and lack of pictures on things. I think it really helped me just as much to sit there and analyze my mistakes and really piece things out; I was explaining things to myself just as much as I was explaining them for the posts.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I can actually answer why I use muted, organic colours. It's because a strong influence in my love of miniatures is old school pre-cgi special effects, miniatures, and creatures. Half of me likes to pretend I'm working in a creature shop and my Terraclips board is the "set". Since it's not a job you can do like it used to be, it's a nod to my inner 80's kid who wanted to be Harryhausen when he grew up.

It's an extra layer of enjoyment to the process... even if sometimes to get something done that I don't want to paint I pretend there's an angry producer stalking me who wants that air elemental by Friday or the whole shoot is ruined! It costs a lot of money to shoot on location in the living room, you know.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

We're going to aim for one of these per month and have a bunch of really neat Reaper figures picked out. We try to pick ones that are interesting but also have challenging parts to work with, so we can show different approaches to solving problems.

Glad you liked it and found it helpful, hopefully you'll enjoy the new stuff too!

Recently Browsing
0 members

Similar Content

One step closer to having the full Dungeon Dwellers set finished! I tried a lot of different stuff here, most for the first time! Such as...
-Full NMM armor
-Freehand on cloak
-Painted highlights on liquid
-A unique gem in the shield (Watermelon Tourmaline)
-A tiny bit of OSL on the eyes

I recently finished playing Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and felt the urge to paint something piratey. There is a lot of room for improvement, and I regret my colour scheme (It is lacking a bit of contrast) but I still enjoyed painting this one, I even felt adventurous enough to attempt some weathering on the sword which didn't turn out as horrible as I anticipated. Overall a good learning exercise.

One of my favorite Fantasy races are the Undead, followed by Chaos and Reptilians.
I already have my Lost World Project which tells a tale of Conquistadores, Reptilians, Dinosaurs, Undead and a lot more.
However those Undead are the Egyptian Style and Pirate/Jungle style.

This thread will be filled with my beloved Gothic Undead, Demons, Monsters and all things that go bump in the night.
In my Lost World Project I tell an ongoing story, here I will post about all other dark things without coherency.
There might be snippets of loose stories to accompany a mini or not...

I hope you guys and gals and creatures will like it.

Let's kick off with the critters I painted a while ago to get a feel of what is coming.

Enjoy! ( or not)

Bats and a Murder of Crows

EDIT: I will include some Bones and minis. The bulk will be metal and I want to give this an oldschool vibe.
Preferred minis will be, Reaper, Grenadier, Ral Partha, Rafm, Metal Magic, Otherworld and Early Citadel.
The Asian Undead will be from Zenith since I backed the Kensei Undead Samurai KS and will get their own thread. ( Nippon, Land of the Rising Moon) and the Egyptian ones are in Shifting Sands Project)

EDIT - Asked to merge my Undead Threads into one.
Now Lords and Ladies of Death.

This is for all the Ghotic Undead and their friends like Werewolves/Witches/Demons etc etc..